September 23 2026 - 10:30am
A leader spoke at the Liberal Democrat conference this week, but it was not Ed Davey. Zoe Hollowood of Liberal Voice for Women opposed the motion on “Restoring Trans Rights”, which demanded the replacement of statutory guidance on single-sex spaces. It was, she argued, a pretext to change the law, “about ripping away rights from women, and destroying the clarity of the Supreme Court ruling”.
Her speech was brave and legally accurate: one which any decent liberal would be hard pressed to object to. Yet the motion passed overwhelmingly, with Davey’s backing.
Of course, sneering pundits will dismiss this as a fringe, culture-war irrelevance. But how party leaders answer the Woman Question, and balance the rights of rape survivors, tells us a great deal. If Davey still sincerely believes, as he has stated in the past, that some women have penises, he must be terrified of the trans activists within his party. This doesn’t bode well for the future of the Liberal Democrats.
Perhaps aware that he was effectively delivering an early eulogy for his career, Davey gave a rousing keynote speech. He raged against Elon Musk, Donald Trump and the corruption of British politics by dark, well-funded forces. Invoking the memory of the Battle of Cable Street, he told delegates they were engaged in “the fight of our lives”, positioning the Liberal Democrats as a bulwark against Reform UK and a resurgent far Right. But a man unable to tell the truth about basic biology is unlikely to have manned the barricades in the East End.
Yet while he was clear about what the Liberal Democrats oppose, Davey offered little meat about what they are actually for. Being a Liberal Democrat, he declared, means “empowering the powerless, and holding the already powerful to account”. He then lurched into a panic about superintelligent AI, comparing its alleged threat to that posed by climate change and nuclear weapons.
There was one substantial, if stale, proposal. Davey wants Britain to join the European single market, as well as a customs union, and claims that the growth arising from this future settlement would pay for raising the tax-free allowance to £15,000 and the higher-rate threshold to £56,000. But this is less an answer to Britain’s immediate problems than an attempt to get the Remainer band back together.
Nonetheless, Davey is right about one thing: the Liberal Democrats are different from Reform. Voters do not like them. There have long been murmurings that the pursuit of carefully targeted seats has left the party aimless, while an Ipsos poll from this month put the party on 9% and in fifth place. Winning 72 MPs in 2024 was a boon. But winning parliamentary seats is a means, not an end.
When Ed Davey took the leadership, he was handed a gift. Polarization has left hordes of politically homeless voters looking for centrist alternatives. There ought to be room for a liberal party: one that defends free speech and women’s rights; resists state overreach; takes voters’ concerns about immigration and crime seriously; and offers a credible economic alternative to both punitive taxation and magical thinking.
A serious party would understand that liberalism means facing reality, not indulging fantasies about sex change or waving the shroud of fascism or killer AI. But that would require a leader, not a doom-monger better known for stunts than policies.
Three days before the conference, Roz Savage MP wrote: “Ask people what Britain would look and feel like after ten years of Liberal Democrat government and many would struggle to answer.” After listening to Davey, it is clear that he would be among them.
